Appel's first start was highly anticipated by Astros fans, who expect this kid to be the face of the starting rotation in a few years.

The Astros paid $6.35 million for Appel, and they certainly expect to get a lot out of him for that kind of money.

Appel took his first step toward making it to the MLB on Friday, and here's how it all went down.

Grade

Appel's first inning of pro baseball was a shaky one that started to go wrong on the very first pitch.

Tzu-Win Lin led off for the Lowell Spinners against Appel, and he drove the very first pitch of Appel's career over the center fielder's head for a lead-off triple. Lin later scored on a groundout.

After giving up two more hits, Appel was in a jam with runners on the corners and only one out. The best-case scenario would have been to force the opposing batter to ground into a double play, and he did his best to make that happen.

Appel did force a groundout, but the ball couldn't be turned for two, instead having the runner on third trot home to give Lowell an early 2-0 lead.

That's when it looked like Appel started pitching for real.

After retiring the final batter of the first inning with an eight-pitch strikeout, Appel shut down Lowell in the second, going one-two-three on just seven pitches.

Appel was done after just two innings, as the team just wanted him to shake off some rust. At the end of the day, this is what his stat line looked like:

2.0 IP

2 ER

3 H

1 K

0 BB

26 pitches (19 strikes)

9.00 ERA

1.50 WHIP

While it wasn't a great start to the day for Appel, he certainly battled back and looked very good by the end. He hit around 95 mph on the gun on a consistent basis and threw three different pitches.

The stat line doesn't look pretty, but to expect this kid to come out and throw five shutout innings is just unrealistic. On the whole, the Astros should be happy with this performance.

Overall Grade: B+

Twitter Reaction

No debut would be complete without a bit of analysis from the fans.

It was a beautiful day for Appel to make this first start as a professional pitcher.